From User to Contributor: Organizing Events for First-Time Contributors
Over the last decade, rOpenSci has played a pivotal role in diversifying the open research software community by integrating new developers from underrepresented communities and enabling newcomers to become regular contributors to our federation of scientific software via various engagement channels. In 2024 we piloted a new program to support first-time contributors to open source projects.
Making your first contribution to open source can be both empowering and yet very intimidating.
Steinmacher et al.1 identified 13 social barriers preventing newcomers from making their first contributions to open source software projects, including barriers related to Reception, Communication, and Orientation. We consider that most of these barriers are, in one way or another, related to:
How easy it is to get set up to make a contribution
How easy it is to find a task to start with
How warmly first contribution is received
Therefore, to encourage and empower contributors, we created a new type of community event which supports specifically first-time contributors to open source software and translation projects. Our goal was to create an inclusive and supportive environment, which would result in a positive learning experience and empower participants to continue contributing.
We designed and piloted this new community event format based on pairing community calls to introduce the topics, and specialized hands-on coworking sessions (mini-translathons and mini-hackathons) to give opportunities for participation.
rOpenSci Community Calls are 1-hour online events with 2-5 speakers, 1 moderator, and include 20-40 minutes of discussion/Q&A. These calls serve to strengthen connections between members of the rOpenSci community, teach technical and social topics, bring different stakeholders’ perspectives to light, and identify unmet needs on a topic. Video, transcripts, notes and summaries of all our calls are published. We have hosted over 40 calls over the last 10 years and attract a global audience with representation from academia, government, non-profit, and industry. We have also started holding these events in Spanish (as of 2023) and Portuguese (as of 2024) to expand global accessibility.
Coworking sessions are informal, online, gatherings held once a month in rotating timezones. Each session features a different theme and Community Host with expertise in that theme, facilitated by rOpenSci staff. At these events, participants meet other scientific software developers and experts, cowork on their own projects, and/or ask questions and receive guidance as they work. After each session we publish shared notes and resources. We have hosted over 40 sessions since 2021.
This book presents the experiences and lessons learned through our pilot events, an overview of how to run these kinds of events, and specific details on how to run the community calls, mini-translathons, and mini-hackathons. In the Appendices we share examples and templates useful for running these events.
While instructions and notes are presented within an rOpenSci context, we hope that they are clear enough that they could be adapted as a model for use in other organizations. The format has been designed to be scalable across our federation of scientific open source software and serves as a model for maintainers to replicate in recruiting contributors and co-maintainers.
We hope this book will inspire and empower you to run your own events to support first-time contributors to open source software and translation projects.
1.0.1 Contributions to this book
If you find any errors or things that need clarification, we would be grateful if you opened an issue or pull request in the repository for this book.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
This work was supported by a NumFOCUS Small Development Grant to rOpenSci.
1.0.2 How to cite this book
Yanina Bellini Saibene & Steffi LaZerte. (2026). From User to Contributor: Organizing Events for First-Time Contributors (Version v1.0). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18235703
Igor Steinmacher, Tayana Conte, Marco Aurélio Gerosa, and David Redmiles. 2015. Social Barriers Faced by Newcomers Placing Their First Contribution in Open Source Software Projects. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW ’15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1379–1392. https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675215↩︎